Silver Lake to buy accounting software firm BlackLine

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The middle-market arm of private equity firm Silver Lake said on Thursday it will buy a majority stake in BlackLine Systems, a fast-growing Los Angeles-based financial software provider that boasts Boeing Co and AT&T Inc as clients.

The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal, but a person familiar with the matter said Silver Lake would pay more than $200 million for the stake, without debt financing.

BlackLine's founder and chief executive, Therese Tucker, will remain at the helm and retain a "significant" equity interest in the company, Silver Lake and BlackLine said in a joint statement. The deal is expected to close this month.

"We see an enormous opportunity to bring world-class transaction analytics and workflow technology to financial process management," Hollie Moore Haynes, a managing director with Silver Lake Sumeru, the middle-market investment group of Silver Lake, said in the statement.

A former SunGard Treasury Systems technology chief, Tucker in 2001 founded BlackLine, which has a customer base of more than 75,000 users in over 100 countries. BlackLine's revenue increased more than 55 percent year-over-year in the first half of 2013, according to the statement.